Tag Archives: Donald Trump

national news, political news

Gen. McCaffrey lines up … against Trump!

khan

One more critique of a leading American who’s abandoned Donald J. Trump … and then I’m out for the rest of the day.

This one comes from retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

http://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/donald-trump-is-an-abusive-braggart-unfit-to-lead-our-armed-forces/

McCaffrey wrote an essay in the Seattle Times in which he said the following: Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is “unfit” to become president of the United States.

The “final straw” was Trump’s attack on a Gold Star Mother. McCaffrey writes: “Trump’s cruel cultural jab at Ghazala Kahn as a grieving Gold Star mother is simply the final straw. In my judgment, Trump, if elected, would provoke a political and constitutional crisis within a year.”

Khan’s son, Army Capt. Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq in 2004 trying to protect the men under his command. The Khan family is of Muslim faith. Mom and Dad Khan criticized Trump at the Democratic National Convention. Trump’s response was to say they had “no right” to criticize him and then he speculated out loud that Mrs. Khan’s silence was mandated by her Muslim faith.

It was a disgraceful display by someone who is seeking to become our head of state.

It also was too much for Gen. McCaffrey.

Something tells me the general’s rebuke won’t be the last.

national news, political news

Another GOP leader abandons Trump

Campaign_2016_The_Latest-4179c.wdp

I’m trying to remember the last time a major party presidential nominee suffered the embarrassments that have fallen all over Donald J. Trump.

They’re coming in the form of leaders within his own party who are saying the same thing: They cannot support his presidential candidacy.

I guess you have to go back to, say, 1972, when Democrats abandoned the candidacy of anti-Vietnam War insurgent Sen. George McGovern.

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has joined the growing ranks of Republicans who are tossing Trump aside.

She writes of her opposition to Trump in a Washington Post essay:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gop-senator-why-i-cannot-support-trump/2016/08/08/821095be-5d7e-11e6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html

Collins writes: “My conclusion about Mr. Trump’s unsuitability for office is based on his disregard for the precept of treating others with respect, an idea that should transcend politics. Instead, he opts to mock the vulnerable and inflame prejudices by attacking ethnic and religious minorities. Three incidents in particular have led me to the inescapable conclusion that Mr. Trump lacks the temperament, self-discipline and judgment required to be president. ”

The incidents were Trump’s mocking of a New York Times reporter’s physical disability, his suggestion that a judge couldn’t preside over a case involving Trump University because of his ethnic heritage and his ridiculous feud with the parents of a slain U.S. Army soldier.

Collins has concluded, along with others within the party, that Trump is not fit for the office he seeks.

Will she support Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton? Collins calls herself a “lifelong Republican,” which makes me believe she won’t cast her ballot for Clinton.

Still, she is denying her own party’s nominee her ultimate endorsement.

If I were a betting man, I’d bet we’ll see more of the same in the weeks to come.

national news, political news

Character takes center stage in campaign

here-are-the-top-vice-president-picks-for-donald-trump-and-hillary-clinton_1

Michael Dukakis once declared during the 1988 presidential campaign that the issue that year was about “competence.”

Pure and simple, the Democratic nominee said. The voters would judge whether he or Vice President George H.W. Bush was competent enough to run the country.

Voters went for Bush.

This year, according to a Politico report, the issue is “character.”

It’s also about trustworthiness, which is an element of character.

Republican nominee Donald J. Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton are busy trading barrages over who between them is fit — or unfit — to become commander in chief.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/does-anyone-care-about-issues-anymore-or-only-whether-trump-is-crazy-214150

So far it’s clear to me that the GOP nominee’s fitness poses the greater concern.

He fluffs a response to a question about the “nuclear triad.” He says he won’t rule out the use of nuclear weapons. He gives his tacit blessing for other nations to acquire nukes.

Then we have his litany of insults, put-downs and mocking of others. A reporter with a physical disability. His various nicknames and childish rejoinders. His statements about women, a distinguished U.S. senator/war hero. His assertion that a judge cannot adjudicate a case involving Trump University simply because of his ethnic heritage. His ridiculous and gratuitous attack against a Gold Star family.

Character? Does this suggest a candidate with character?

Sure, Hillary Clinton is hardly the paragon of virtue. She has her own character issues with which to deal. Again, though, to my eyes they pale in comparison to the astonishing demonstrations that Trump has put forth.

Character will become the signature issue of this campaign.

As Politico reports: “To be clear: The candidates’ brands of invective are not equivalent. Nothing can quite compare with Trump’s endless—and seemingly spontaneous—flow of crude characterizations of anyone who would cross him. For better or worse, Clinton’s attacks are much subtler, and probably more strategic, since her own high negative poll ratings make it imperative that she portray Trump as so unpredictable, and even unstable, as to be an unacceptable choice for president.”

This campaign is getting uglier by the day.

national news, political news

Texas turning ‘purple’? Maybe … but not just yet

Donald Trump gestures while speaking surrounded by people whose families were victims of illegal immigrants on July 10, 2015 while meeting with the press at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, where some shared their stories of the loss of a loved one. The US business magnate Trump, who is running for president in the 2016 presidential elections, angered members of the Latino community with recent comments but says he will win the Latino vote. AFP PHOTO / FREDERIC J. BROWN (Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)

George Will is a conservative columnist/pundit who — no surprise here — detests Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.

He has written an essay, moreover, that makes an intriguing suggestion. It is that Trump’s presidential candidacy just might turn one of the nation’s most Republican-leaning states into something far less so.

I refer to Texas.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-texas-become-another-brick-in-the-democrats-blue-wall/2016/07/20/08b55f5e-4de0-11e6-a422-83ab49ed5e6a_story.html

My own sense is that Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton has a long way to go just yet in making Texas truly competitive in this election.

Will, though, suggests that the time is closer than some of us believe.

He notes that Dallas County has gone from solidly Republican to solidly Democratic. He reminds us that Hispanics and Asians are two fast-growing minorities. He speaks as well about how Texas is mirroring the nation’s turn toward a majority-minority population.

All of that plays into Clinton’s push to become president.

Texas, though, hasn’t elected a Democrat to any statewide office since 1994. Will says that’s the longest statewide GOP winning streak in the nation.

My own sense is that if Texas becomes moderately competitive in the Clinton vs. Trump contest — meaning if Clinton can close to within, say, 5 or 6 percentage of Trump — then we’re going to see a serious blowout in the making.

If she somehow manages to win the state’s 38 electoral votes — and that can happen only if Latinos and African-Americans turn out in record numbers — then the blowout can be of historic proportions.

Will it happen in Texas?

Maybe soon. Just not right now.

national news, political news

Ex-Klansman polls better than Trump among blacks? Wow!

david-duke-620x375

David Duke is polling better among African-Americans than Donald J. Trump.

That’s the lead of a Washington Post story about the U.S. Senate candidacy of a former Ku Klux Klansman.

Uh, that would be Duke.

Part of me should be shocked — shocked, I tell ya! — to know that a certifiable hater would do better than the Republican presidential nominee among black Americans.

Here’s the Washington Post story.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/05/david-dukes-getting-more-support-from-black-voters-in-his-race-than-donald-trump-is-in-his/

Duke is running as a Republican for the Senate seat in Louisiana, where he’s been a fixture for years on the fringes of the political mainstream. He has served in the Louisiana Legislature. I’ve never met the guy, although I did venture once across the state line to cover his unsuccessful bid to become governor. That was in 1991.

That’s where another part of me finds this report not quite so surprising. Dismaying, yes. Surprising? I’ll tell you a quick story.

I was working in Beaumont, Texas, at the Enterprise in the early 1990s. Duke was running for governor against the colorful incumbent “Cajun Edwin” Edwards. I thought I’d drive a few miles across the Sabine River into Louisiana to take an up-close look at the political climate there.

I went to Vinton, La., got out of my car and started visiting with plain ol’ folks about the campaign.

I met an African-American woman who told me — and I am not making this up — that she was going to vote for Duke. I was stunned to hear it. I recall today that she recognized the disbelief in my face and explained herself.

Duke, she said, sought to rid the welfare rolls of slackers. She was tired of those who were living off the government dole while doing nothing to improve themselves or their condition in life.

It did not matter to her that Duke once was a grand wizard of the KKK, an organization with a long, sordid and bloody history of violence against African-Americans, Jews and Third World immigrants.

This woman was living in the here and now and, by golly, David Duke was her man!

Does David Duke deserve a place in the U.S. Senate, where he would be voting on laws intended to govern all Americans? In my view, absolutely not! It’s not my call to make.

Still, the idea that this guy — of all guys running for Congress — would poll better among African-Americans than a major-party presidential nominee simply makes my head spin.

national news, political news, State news

George P. breaks ranks with Dad, Uncle W. and Poppy

Bush_Trump_jpg_312x1000_q100

Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush has swilled the Donald J. Trump Kool-Aid.

He says it’s time to support the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.

Well, I never …

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/08/07/george-p-bush-trump-holdout-urges-support-him/

George P. hasn’t exactly “endorsed” Trump, who performed a major hatchet job on the young land commissioner’s father, Jeb Bush, during the GOP primary. Trump’s campaign so angered others in the iconic political family that the Bushes’ two former presidents — George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — stayed away from the Republican convention in Cleveland.

So did Jeb, of course.

According to the Texas Tribune: “From Team Bush, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, but you know what? You get back up and you help the man that won, and you make sure that we stop Hillary Clinton,” Bush said, according to video of the remarks provided by an audience member.

There you have it. The goal is to “stop Hillary Clinton,” the Democratic nominee. No matter what. Regardless of how Trump trashed P.’s own father, how he said Uncle W. deceived the nation and lied us into war in Iraq.

Politics at times produces the strangest alliances imaginable.

This appears to be one of them.

business news, local news, national news, political news

Still trying to grasp the ‘problem’ with the economy

USEconomy1

I must need to crack open a few economics books.

The U.S. Labor Department released its monthly jobs numbers this past Friday and they came in quite well.

The economy added 255,000 non-farm private-sector jobs; the unemployment rate remains at 4.9 percent. The jobs figures helped stimulate the stock market as investors — for a day at least — demonstrated confidence in the economy. The economy has added 14 million jobs since Barack Obama became president.

Is that bad news? Really?

But then we hear the politicians.

The economy stinks, they say. Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump is leading the gloom-doom amen chorus by telling us how “incompetent” the government has been during the past eight years.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, of course, kept up the mantra during his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Too much wealth belongs to too few Americans, he said. We have to spread it around, he said; we have to break up those big banks.

I keep hearing how “terrible” the economy is doing. What I hear, though, doesn’t quite match up with what I see.

I live in a section of Amarillo, Texas, that is undergoing a significant business and residential expansion. My wife and I drive north and south all the time along Coulter Street and are amazed at the transformation we’ve witnessed during the two decades we’ve lived here.

We joked just this weekend about how we had moved into our newly built house in late 1996 when it literally was one block from the edge of urban civilization. Everything west of us was pasture land. That’s it! Cattle grazed a block from our front door.

Today? We see nothing but rooftops for as to the horizon.

Businesses are springing up like the crab grass that envelops fescue lawns in this part of the world.

OK, I get that the economic recovery could be stronger. I read the economists’ reports telling us of their concern that the economy could tank at any moment.

None of this, though, matches up with what I’m seeing in this city where we live.

What in the world am I missing?

political news, State news

Voter ID: a solution in search of a problem

vote fraud

Let’s talk for a moment about voter fraud.

If there’s an overblown, overhyped and overstated problem with the American electoral system, it has to be voter fraud.

Even in Texas, ,which has become somewhat legendary because of one instance of voter fraud. It occurred in 1948 when Duval County in South Texas supposedly recorded more votes than registered voters. The inflated number of votes allegedly pushed a young political candidate, Democrat Lyndon Johnson, over the top in his party primary runoff contest for the U.S. Senate.

How many instances of ballot-box chicanery have occurred in Texas since then? Damn few.

Republicans, though, have seized on voter fraud as a compelling national political problem. They keep insisting that Americans must prove they are eligible to vote by showing photo ID documents when they go to the polls.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/the-integrity-of-our-elections/

I don’t necessarily object personally to showing photo ID when I go vote. I am able to present a valid driver’s license. A lot of Americans, though, do not drive; they don’t own passports; they don’t have licenses to carry concealed weapons. They’re out of luck.

Some courts have ruled that voter ID laws, therefore, to be inherently unconstitutional.

The most objectionable element of this discussion, though, has been the canard put forward that the electoral system is corrupt. Fear mongers — now led by Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump — keep insisting that illegal immigrants are voting by the thousands to elect Democrats to public office.

As Erica Grieder writes in her blog for Texas Monthly: “It’s true that voter fraud is real. It’s even true that there have been recorded instances of people passing themselves off as someone else in order to cast a fraudulent vote, which is the specific form of fraud that laws requiring photo ID might prevent. But that crime is not even remotely common, nor do Americans have any real cause to worry about elections being stolen in the most labor-intensive way imaginable.”

Trump is now predicting that the presidential election will be “rigged.” How does he know this to be true? He just says it.

Those who are following his futile efforts to change the subject away from his abject ignorance about anything relating to government and public policy, are buying into it.

national news, political news

Ready for a ‘first-name president’?

hillary

Am I hearing things?

Whenever I watch TV news/opinion talk shows, I keep hearing people — political experts, strategists and rank-and-file voters — referring to the Democratic Party presidential nominee by her first name.

She’s just plain “Hillary.”

Hillary’s got to do this or that. Hillary suffers from this “trust” deficit. Hillary’s standing in the polls is going up.

Hillary, Hillary, Hillary …

I don’t yet know about the psychology of this first-name reference. Hillary Clinton is a serious person. By my way of thinking, she’s far more serious than her Republican presidential nominee opponent, Donald J. Trump.

I’ve tried throughout my commentary on this political campaign to reference the Democratic nominee the same way media refer to every other politician or public figure: first and last name in the initial reference; last name in subsequent references.

I’ll admit, though, to fall off the traditional method wagon. I’ve taken to referring to other politicians by their first names. They are Mitt (Romney), Newt (Gingrich) and Jeb (Bush).

I mean no disrespect to any of them. I actually rather like Mitt and Jeb. Newt? Not so much.

I get a strange sense, though, that the use of Hillary Clinton’s first name only is more a symptom of disrespect than affection. I hear it from disgruntled voters who are likely to vote for Trump. I hear it also from conservative media talking heads who certainly are no fans of the Democratic Party presidential nominee.

As for the office these two people are seeking — the presidency — I also have taken up the custom of using the term “President” while referring to those who have held the office. I use that reference out of respect for the office.

My hope is that the media and others will treat Hillary Clinton with the same respect accorded those who have preceded her in that high office.

Now … as for Donald J. Trump, I’ll admit to anticipating a serious struggle if somehow he manages to become the next president of the United States.

national news, political news

‘Widespread chatter’ that Trump should drop out?

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donald

I remain extremely dubious of a notion that’s being kicked around about Republican Party presidential nominee Donald J. Trump.

It’s that Republican “insiders” are telling Trump to drop out of the race and give the nomination to someone who at least can help the GOP retain control of at least the Senate, if not the House of Representatives as well.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/insiders-to-trump-drop-out-226689

Let me be as clear as a mountain spring on this: It will not happen …. not like that.

Trump won’t drop out because someone is telling him to do so. If he were to drop out of the race, I am beginning to believe it would be because he had planned to do so all along.

Trump’s fans — the numbers of whom seem to be shrinking — have been fond of telling us how “unconventional” his campaign has been.

You want unconventional? Not a single thing would surprise me about what this guy might do. He’s already said things about political foes that in a normal election year would have gotten him tossed to the side of the campaign trail. It’s almost as though he has wanted to lose the GOP primary fight.

Now, do I believe that Trump has calculated an exit from the campaign? Do I believe he’s already made that decision?

No. I do not believe such thing.

Neither do I believe that Trump is going to do what others want him to do.

Politico reports that key Republican “insiders” took a survey about Trump’s candidacy. According to Politico: “The effect Trump is having on down-ballot races has the potential to be devastating in November,” added a Florida Republican. “His negative image among Hispanics, women and independents is something that could be devastating to Republicans. Trump’s divisive rhetoric to the Hispanic community at large has the potential to be devastating for years to come.”

Politico reports that Trump has made zero indication that he’s going to drop out.

What the heck? He won the GOP nomination fair and square. He knocked 16 other opponents out of the ring. He rolled up big vote totals. I give him credit for that. Honestly.

Still, there’s something amazingly unpredictable about this guy. He’s violated every political norm there is to violate. He’s still standing. But in the wake of his party convention and the convention that nominated Hillary Rodham Clinton, he has managed to make an unbelievable array of unforced errors.

He has invited Russia to hack into Clinton’s e-mails to see what she discarded; he has said Russia hasn’t occupied Crimea, when it has. He has decided to attack two Gold Star parents because they were critical of him at the Democratic National Convention.

And yes, his once-vaunted poll standing has plummeted.

Does anyone really expect this individual to do what other party leaders want him to do, such as quit the race?

No. If he does, it’ll be part of some grand plan he cooked up long ago.

But I don’t actually expect that to happen, either.

Unless …